How to feel optimistic in the face of crisis? Ask the kids fighting slug-like aliens | Alexander Hurst

Recently I found myself thinking about slug-like aliens that crawl through people’s ears and into their brains, with the ultimate purpose of global domination. It would explain a lot about what has gone so wrong with the world, wouldn’t it? And it was why I immediately flashed back to the children’s fantasy series Animorphs when Donald Trump’s health secretary and conspiracy theorist, Robert F Kennedy Jr, admitted to having had a worm in his brain.

While visiting my parents in Cleveland, Ohio recently, I realised that a few books from the children’s fantasy series were still sitting on the shelves in my old bedroom. No fewer than 54 Animorphs titles were published between 1996 and 2001, and a total of 35m copies have been sold. “I may have just landed a job thanks to Animorphs,” my childhood friend Clifton texted me with excitement in the mid-2010s, when we were fresh out of college. “It was an interview for a vegan food cart and the last question they asked me was what Animorph I would morph into. I said an orangutan.”

The premise sees five adolescent friends encounter a crashed alien spaceship and then face an intergalactic war against the Yeerks, genocidal slug-adjacent beings that slither into the brains of the host species. The young humans are given the ability to transform into any animals they’ve touched, along with the simple task of defending humanity. My generation were told we could grow up to do anything, that life was a continual arc of progress towards better lives, and that the old ideological battles of the past had been laid to rest. We were empowered by what we found in the pages of Animorphs: that Jake, Cassie, Rachel, Marco and Tobias had been endowed with the power of nature itself to help Earth fend off the existential threat of alien conquest.

Despite the optimism of the 90s, Animorphs was surprisingly dark and morally nuanced for millennial children’s fiction. Foreshadowing the real-world future, the teenagers watch parents and other family members fall under the cognitive control of the Yeerks. Looking back at the series now – and the era that produced it – the Animorphs’ baddies had to be an alien species, because it would have stretched credulity that humanity might destroy the Earth by itself, of its own volition. Now, instead of the Yeerks, we have megalomaniac billionaires and fossil fuel interests that have instilled climate denialism and defeatism into our minds – aided by media they so often control – and stripped us of the ability to even conceptualise our collective agency.

The concept of discrete “generations” might be dubious, but where it holds most firmly is in shared cultural references. What millennials share is the distinct feeling of being a bridge: between the analogue and the digital; between a shared informational reality and the post-truth world; between an optimistic world and a pessimistic one. (This latter point shows up even in scientific analysis of pop music: studies have concluded that pop has become sadder.)

It’s the reflex towards a hopeful worldview, and the subsequent shattering of this optimism, that lie at the heart of millennial nostalgia for the less fraught times of our youth. On social media, it’s been dubbed the “millennial optimism era”. You don’t have to search hard to find the sources of that nostalgia: Akon and Britney Spears coming out of the speakers at my gym, Sum 41 playing at the bougie brasserie around the corner. Meanwhile one huge comeback tour collides into the next. Onscreen, too, everything seems to be getting a remake or a reboot: Toy Story, Scary Movie, Air Bud and, if things go well, Animorphs too, which had a brief, two-season run on TV just before the turn of the millennium. Ryan Coogler, who directed Sinners, is developing a new Animorphs TV series for Disney+.

Across the generational line, millennials and gen Z share the same eco-anxiety: in France, it has been found to be significantly more pronounced among those aged 15-34 than among those over 50. Researchers in India found a similar pattern, just as they did in the US. Hannah Ritchie from Our World In Data writes in her personal newsletter that older generations are actually more likely to say that we’re already feeling the impacts of the climate crisis, because they can compare today’s heatwaves and snowless winters with the climate of their childhoods. But the emotional response is different, she writes: millennials and gen Z are more likely to feel fear, guilt and outrage about it.

There is a cruel irony to the fatalism of the young: those who will most suffer the consequences of the climate emergency are those most resigned to that fate. Similarly, I think there is something that doesn’t show up in data yet, but is there in gen Z’s nostalgia for the “millennial optimism era”. It’s the difference between millennials believing that all of this can and should be fought, and gen Z having no nostalgic point of reference for the plausibility of fighting it at all.

Sinners was an intensely literate movie about history, racism and trauma, forces that sap us of our vitality, and our ability to fight back. So I’m not surprised my fellow millennial Coogler might be turning to Animorphs next. In the end, I suspect that he might circle the following: the threat to all of us is not solely alien, but an alien version of ourselves. That fighting back successfully will mean remembering who we really are. That nature is our ally, and we have to remember how indelibly our future is tied to its state of wellbeing. I can’t think of a more urgent millennial-optimist metaphor to splash on to the big screen.